Even Permissioned email marketing can kill your brand

Even the best permission based list that is nurtured with great care and treated with respect can kill you. One bad email campaign can get your corporate website taken off the air by your Internet Service Provider. It takes very few spam complaints about the IP address you use to send the emails, and the spam vigilantes are all over you like a rash.

Remember that people forget. They gave you permission, and they forgot who you are. And your lovingly crafted, subtly worded, painstakingly created, drop dead gorgeous message arrives. And they click "Report as Spam" because:

• They forgot you
• They are having a bad day
• They have a religion of reporting every third email as spam
• They hit the wrong button
• Separate from your email you upset them somehow
• etc
• etc etc

It's a bit like "Three strikes and you're out". A small but finite repeated number of complaints to the vigilantes and they start to let your ISP know that you are a potential spammer. Well SPEWS doesn't (well, it does, but it works very quickly, so quickly that people often miss or ignore the warning). SPEWS blocks the email address of your outbound email server. At this point you wish with all your heart that you had used an email outsourcer, because, if you had, you'd be home, free!

But you didn't. Against all advice you decided to email from your regular email server. "It'll be fine, our list is fully permissioned!" And now you are finding that your ISP has taken your web site down and is not giving you any access at all, even to take a backup, until you explain yourself.

Why are they doing this?

Because their business is suffering because of spam blocklists and blacklists. It isn't your IP address, it's their IP address, and they want it unblocked. Their other customers are starting to complain and are considering voting with their feet because your action has compromised their email's arrival with their recipients.

"But our list was permissioned!"

Well, was it? People like SPEWS insist on "confirmed opt in" (marketing people often call this "double opt in" and get laughed at a lot). If your list is confirmed opt in you may persuade the ISP to ask the vigilantes very nicely to remove the blockade. Or they may explain to you that you are more trouble than it is worth, and ask you reasonably politely to take your business elsewhere.

And while all this is going on your site is down.

People notice. and they start to put two and two together. A few blogs appear mentioning that your company is spamblocked. Blogs go out in RSS feeds and are picked up surprisingly widely. Google notices, so do Yahoo and the rest. And now you're in trouble.

If I am about to do business with you I look you up online. Long after you've solved the problem the articles are still being picked up by search engines. And your reputation is laid bare for all to see.

Does it matter that your list was permission based and you just hit a few people who forgot? Does it matter that you're ethical?

Not at all. What matters is that you weren't forward thinking enough to separate your email marketing from your website. What matters is that you did not take out this simple insurance by using an outsourcer and making it their problem